WORK IN PROGRESS: The Missing Piece to the Classroom of the Future – The Ability to Scale Down to Scale Up

As many colleges race to build the next generation of technology enhanced learning spaces, there is a huge missing piece to the puzzle and it is not money or funding. This paper will look at the first year of a multi-year, multi-phase project at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), which has embarked upon the journey to build the classroom of the future. Our focus will be from lessons learned the first year of the project from instructors and student input through focus groups, surveys, and classroom assessments. Surprisingly, the lessons learned assert that the biggest obstacles to building the classroom of the future does not depend on the technology or the cost but on a much deeper understanding of the instructors’ teaching needs. We will look at how a divide between traditional information technology (IT) and faculty has created a huge misconception and misunderstanding of the needs in the classroom. The key to fixing the issue involves focusing on the basics of the design process itself and how something as simple as a light switch can make a world of difference in whether the classroom of the future meets with success or failure. In an environment where everyone wants to simply scale up their classrooms by investing in new costly equipment and materials, we may actually need to first scale them down in order to solve the design issues. Only then can we successfully scale them up to a standardized solution in terms of budget, usability, and technologies that can be replicated across campus. Our findings this first year will highlight the areas that seem to be the biggest overlooked concepts when designing for the classroom of the future on campuses today.